Sandcastles
by karisome
Summary: Heero and Relena have a discussion on the beach on how some things are just not meant to be. 1+R angst


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Sandcastles

By: Athame

A/N: Ugh. I haven't written in a while due to a particularly nasty case of writer's block, and I don't think it's completely gone yet. I just felt the need to post something. This fic has been festering in my mind for a while now, and I finally got it down. Only…it didn't turn out quite as I had hoped. -_-;;; 

Warnings: Angst. Much angst.

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The sun burned high in the sky, creating shadows over his face and shadows over hers, along with sporadic splashes of gold in the murmuring waves. Warmth danced tantalizingly on his skin but never permeated past the surface, and it was almost as if the sun was too distant, too afraid to penetrate the layers of the frigid atmosphere. He ran a hand through his hair, pausing slightly as his icy fingers met with the warmth of his temple before dropping his hand to his side and to the cold sand he sat on, burrowing his fingers through the grains. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at her diverted face, and followed her gaze to a little girl building a sandcastle a bit above the line of the tide

"I used to build sandcastles."

Her soft voice carried easily across the gap between them as the sea whispered in the background. Almost against his will, his eyes were drawn to her again, eagerly tracing the contours of her figure and searching with an almost desperate anxiousness for familiarity. She still stared ahead, but he knew that she was aware of his eyes on her by the way her fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on the fabric bunched up at her bent knee. His gaze traveled down from those fingers to bare, shapely calves dusted with white sand. 

It made her seem more real somehow, he mused as he stared at the tiny grains that dared to flaw the smooth, pale skin. Such small, yet noticeable imperfections made her seem more approachable and less aloof and removed from the world. 

He frowned suddenly at the thought, and wondered with increasing discomfort just when she had become not quite as human in his eyes, this person whom he had seen so much imperfection in during the wars.

She spoke again as he looked away, her voice holding the slightest nostalgic inflection to it. 

"Father used to take me to the beach when I was little." 

He felt more than saw the near smile that traced her lips before she continued. "He wasn't always home at the right times, so we often ended up going in cold weather like this. I never minded, though, because nobody else would be there, and it would just be the two of us and the waves and the sand, and he'd sit and laugh and smile as he watched me." 

She trailed off, staring blankly at the ground as the breeze ruffled her bangs and toyed with the ponytail running down her back, occasionally daring to flutter her shirt with its chill. Her soft, subtle scent drifted to him on the wind, mingling pleasantly with the muted astringency of the sea. The faint familiarity of it brought forth a rush of fractured impressions that he didn't realize he remembered – ones of soft warmth, glowing smiles and a strange feeling in his chest that was at once a lightness and a heaviness. They crashed and receded with the persistence of the nearby waves, each one incomplete and fleeting, but continuous. 

And, like he had done in the past when faced with such sensations, he silently reaffirmed with himself that he didn't want them, didn't need them, and that he hadn't missed them. 

Next to him she shifted, and the movement caused something on her finger to glint in the sunlight and catch his attention. He quickly looked away, trying to ignore the silver band circling her ring finger and the sudden, unexpected tightening in his chest. 

Swallowing, he fought to reassure himself that he hadn't missed _her_. 

"Have you ever built sandcastles, Heero?" He looked up at the sudden question, and was met with aquamarine eyes that seemed to look into him and through him, silently probing and searching every dark corner of sins and emotions and thoughts without so much as blinking. She had always been able to make him feel defenseless and exposed with that look. 

She had always been able to make him feel. 

Annoyance at his train of thought as well as his sudden vulnerability made his reply brusque and short.

"No."

He thought he saw something flicker in her eyes before it was gone, but barely had a chance to regret his response before she spoke again in that same soft voice that wavered on the edge of emotion, but never crossed the threshold.

"I didn't think so." She looked away from him, dragging her fingers absently through the sand. "And maybe it's just as well." 

In response to his silence, her eyes fixed themselves on the ground as she continued to trace swirls and shapes into the sand. 

"I had wanted to show you, once," she murmured, almost sadly. "I'd wanted to show you what living was like, what happiness was like." Her finger halted in the middle of drawing a heart.

"I had wanted to show you peace."

In one long stroke, she smoothed her palm over the sand and swept away the designs. 

"But you didn't want me to do any of those things, did you?"

Whatever response his brain had formulated never made it past his lips.

"You didn't want me." 

__

No, he wanted to say. _It was _you_ who didn't want _me_. Not for who I was_.

Instead, he settled for a truth she would be more accepting of: "It was never an issue of what we wanted, Relena. Not for me, and definitely not for you."

He thought he might have detected a hint of bitterness, or maybe even sorrow in the almost-smile that quirked her lips.

"Yes. We both had our duties to the world to fulfill, didn't we?"

He replied quietly, "Aa."

The hiss of the ocean surrounded them again, its subdued murmuring filling the space that both were painfully aware existed between them. There was a time, he thought with a tinge of melancholy, when he would have silently cursed circumstance while reminding himself with all the desperation of a drowning man that he was nothing but a representation for her. He provided the excitement and danger that her life had been lacking, and it was that same thrill that made her look to him for strength and made her think she could love him. And she didn't even realize that he was nothing but a symbol for her, and that in time, symbols crumbled to reveal unwanted realities that were discarded. 

And he didn't want to be discarded. Not by her - not by the one who had been so obviously, so painfully, so beautifully human to him from the very first. He had watched with skepticism as an annoying, naïve girl turned into a frustrating idealist in front of his eyes before finally becoming the woman who picked up and put together the pieces of a broken world with a strength all her own. And somewhere in the middle of losing everything and rebuilding from dust, she had reached out and given him something he had lost ages ago and never thought he would regain. 

Hope.

And it was because she had remained so real, so human in a time where everything was a lie, and still managed to accomplish such daunting, honest tasks, that somewhere along the line his admiration and gratitude had turned into something more. He had underestimated her, and had ended up on the edge of realizing the depth of his feelings for her. 

Maybe it was then that he began to re-evaluate her as a symbol. 

Because symbols are easier to admire, then walk away from. Because you didn't worry about what a symbol perceived you as. Because symbols are ideals made tangible, and therefore are never quite human.

And one does not love something that isn't human. Idolize, perhaps, but never love.

It was with those sentiments that he had left after the Mariemaia incident, walking noiselessly out of the hospital room and out of Relena's life. It had been best, and it had been what he wanted.

So why was he finding it so difficult to breathe upon finding that she had gotten a new life without him in it? He furrowed his brow in agitation, and tried to dispel his previous thoughts with words.

"Why did you want to show me peace so badly?" he asked, voicing the first thing that rose in his mind. It was a stupid question, and he knew the answer long before she replied, but hearing it still managed to cause something in his gut to wrench.

"Because I loved you."

His chuckle was dry and humorless. "How? You didn't know me. You _don't_ know me."

He expected her to be indignant or maybe even angry, but she just sat there with a strangely contemplative expression on her face. It was a while before she finally spoke, her voice brushing against the confines of apathy but never escaping.

"But then _you_ don't know _me,_ either."

He started at her unexpected response, and began to open his mouth to deny it when she cut him off smoothly, almost as if she had never stopped talking. 

"Outside of what we've learned and seen during the war, how much of each other can we really claim to know? The mind fills in gaps with things that are desired or things that have been lost. I should know – I thought you were perfect when I first met you. You were always so mysterious, with so many missing pieces, that without realizing it, I filled in the spaces with my own ideas and my own ideals. I saw you in my mind as someone you weren't." She paused, then continued in a quieter tone. "But you did the same with me, didn't you? I was your representation of hope, and I helped you believe that not everything was tainted or corrupt, and that peace was not just some nebulous dream hovering on the other side of a battlefield. I was your ideal, just as you were mine."

She abruptly stopped, and he felt almost grateful that she had done so. In the space of a few seconds, she had isolated and laid out the reason for his self-inflicted solitude, calmly destroying the illusion he believed only he could see through. 

It was disconcerting.

Then she continued, and her following words were even more unsettling.

"But just because we didn't know everything about each other, doesn't mean that we didn't know anything. True, I saw the person you could be, but I also saw the person you were. And that made me _want_ to know you, because I _wanted_ to love you. But that meant that I was in love with you already."

Her eyebrows knotted for a moment, as if finding it unfair that she should be the one to bare everything. Softly, she finished her semi-monologue.

"So I didn't know every aspect of you life. That didn't make me love you any less." 

There was nothing he could say to that.

Her words pounded into him like a round of bullets, every bit as winding and painful as the real thing. In the end, if he examined and analyzed and was completely honest with himself, everything she said was true. And suddenly he realized that the only thing that had held him back from making a life with Relena had been himself. Back then he had been too insecure and too frightened of his feelings to allow himself to want to know her, to want to love her. 

But, like Relena said, that meant that he already did.

He had just been too foolish to realize or act on it, and now that he knew, he would never get a chance to do so again. 

He squeezed his eyes closed in silent frustration, his fingers fisting in the sand.

Fate was a cruel, sadistic little thing.

Next to him she sighed, as if sensing his thoughts. For the first time since he had bumped into her on the beach, her voice lost its emptiness and filled with emotion – but not the way he remembered it. The young, vivacious girl he had known would never have spoken with such heavy sorrow.

"It's too late, Heero," she murmured, her voice thick with resigned tears. "You're too late."

And, no matter how much he wanted to argue otherwise, he knew it was true because of the bitter, acrid taste of regret settling heavily in his throat. A dull ache began to congeal below his chest, making it difficult to breathe, much less talk, so he merely bowed his head in mute acceptance. She had moved her arms to hug her midsection, her fingers curling tightly into the fabric of her shirt as if she were cold. Her face was turned completely away from his, and she would not look at him. Light glinted off her diamond ring again, catching him in the eye, and he pulled his gaze away to stare vacantly into the rolling sea, a question wrenching from his throat.

"Do you love him?"

She didn't have to ask what he meant. "No." Her fingers curled even tighter. "He's…a wonderful man…and we care for each other, but…"

She couldn't say it, but she didn't have to. And it was probably for the better. Vocalizing what they both knew would only complicate matters even more between them, especially now when there was an implicit understanding that this meeting was for the closure they both needed, not to rekindle a fire that had never been lit. But that didn't mean the knowledge made it hurt any less, and images of what could have been threaded tantalizingly through his mind, along with the words she would have said, but didn't.

__

…I couldn't love anyone but you.

He looked at her again, burning her image into his memory for what could possibly be his last chance to do so as rueful thoughts wove through his mind.

__

It was never meant to be, was it? 

We should have seen that it was doomed from the beginning.

And he knew, because of her stance, and because of her eyes, and because he knew her, that she knew it as well. And beyond that, there was nothing left to say. Except, maybe…

"I'm sorry," he murmured, not sure whether he was apologizing to her, to himself, or to both of them.

She nodded, barely, a silent tear making a track down her cheek. "Me too." 

Tentatively, he stretched out a hand, reaching across the chasm that had always existed between them, and wiped away the tear like he had done all those years ago. A small, strangled noise escaped her throat at his touch, and her fingers dug into her sides as if to prevent even more tears from spilling over.

"Promise me you'll try to be happy," he whispered suddenly, his finger lingering on her soft skin. For a moment he could pretend; for a moment, he could allow himself the belated luxury of surrendering to emotion. A trembling hand rose to clasp his loosely, and for a second time, the distance between them was breached as she smiled sadly and whispered, "I'll try if you'll try."

He returned the smile and nodded, wistful longings curling around him like smoke from dying embers. 

If only things had been different. If only he had not been who he was and she had not been who she was, and if only they had met differently, then maybe they could have been together. 

But the fact was that they weren't, and fate did not listen to 'if only's'.

And nothing, no matter how hard they tried, could change that.

He didn't know who let go first, but the tenuous connection that had been formed was snapped as she lowered her hand and he let his fall to his side. After the pain subsided into a duller, more bearable ache, he asked a question in a voice that held more emotion than Relena had ever heard behind his monotone veneer of defensive indifference.

"You said you used to build sandcastles. Why don't you do so anymore?"

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught her miserable smile as she stared out into the sea, and to the sandcastle of the now-departed little girl. The receding waves had reduced the once tall towers into a small, indistinguishable mound just inside the line of the tide.

"Because no matter how beautiful I made them, the wind and waves would always sweep them away."

He gave a small nod at her reply before standing up in a smooth motion and shading his eyes against the glare of the sun's distant rays. 

"Goodbye, Relena."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her wince at the finality in his tone, before replying in an uncharacteristically subdued tone.

"Goodbye, Heero."

__

And now, he thought sadly as he walked away from the stretch of sand that had witnessed both their first and last meeting, _there really was nothing left to say._

Finis.


End file.
